Monday, April 25, 2011

I've read in the last few weeks an interesting tentative debate on "Why do Brazilians emigrate so infrequently?". The question was posed by Tyler Cowen and Leonardo Moansterio, who started this 'conversatition'. Over a hundred comments later, the main hypothesis summarized by Leo are:

Many poor Brazilians cannot emigrate to developed countries because they are just too far away. Yes, distance and cost still play important roles as limiting factors.

The Brazilian middle class usually doesn't speak english or have family/friend network abroad (This would be mainly because Brazil has been a closed economy for a long period of time)

The relatively few high-educated Brazilians would have no strong reasons to emigrate permanently since they enjoy pretty good living standards.

I would also like to share this: The Chronicle of Higher Education created a very interesting interactive map on the the percentage of adults with college degrees over time in the USA. Check the map here. (Hat tip: Flowing Data)

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

I was working on the project "Scenarios for the Brazilian labor market" when I bumped into this paper: "Projection of populations by level of educational attainment, age, and sex for 120 countries for 2005-2050" (KC et al, 2010).

It's a very interesting paper, and It's part of an ambitious project. The authors produce projections for 120 countries! (covering 93% of the world population in 2005!) by five-year age groups, sex, and four levels of educational attainment for the years 2005-2050.

Friday, April 1, 2011

"If people believe that other people/firms will move there, they too will move there. If they believe it will fail, they won't and it fails. Changing expectations is critical for success."

I beleive that's the point. Chinese Urbanization has been so accelerated in recent years (mostly driven by government initiatives) that this pace seems to be leading to a sort of mismatch between future expectation and current actions of economic agents. [Ok, I recognize China must be much more complicated than that. I'm jus trying to keep it simple]